As ridiculous as it was when the American ambassador to Australia spoke out against Aussies pirating Game of Thrones this week, it turns out there’s a much broader and coordinated effort afoot to promote intellectual property rights worldwide, led by the United States Foreign Service.

The campaigns in some of these countries make more sense than others—Spain, for example, is being pressed to strengthen its digital piracy laws, and Estonia has also popped up in recent weeks as having a cavalier attitude toward IP. But is IP theft that much more of an issue in Suriname versus Morocco that it merits a public warning? Even experts are left scratching their heads about what prompted the choice of these particular embassies.

“On the one hand, these superficially inoffensive statements backed up by vague, implicit threats may just be United States standard diplomatic operating procedure applied to copyright policy,” said James Grimmelman, a law professor at the New York Law School. “On the other, trotting out the ambassadors might be a way of using their diplomatic tact to placate the copyright lobby without committing to any concrete course of action.”

When we asked a State Department spokesperson about why some embassies were speaking out when others weren’t and if there was a direct mandate from Washington, she dodged the question.

“As I’m sure you know, April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day,” Laura Seal, a State Department spokesperson told Ars. “I [recommend] to you a blog post by Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Robert Hormats, which is posted here.”

Ars left comments on all of the Facebook pages of these embassies but did not receive an immediate reply from most of them, except on the Facebook page of the US Embassy Santiago in Chile, where staff posted a Spanish-language message reminding its audience of World IP Day.

“We are not speaking out against anything,” an unnamed staffer wrote to Ars on that embassy’s page. “We are speaking in favor of [intellectual property rights] and the need to increase awareness of it.”

Preserving IP in the Great White North

Up in Ottawa, the US Embassy played host to Lev Kubiak, director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, a division of the Department of Homeland Security.

In a mind-bogglingly boring (no wonder it only has eight views so far!) five-minute YouTube video where Kubiak is oddly facing off camera the entire time, the IP czar makes the case to an unnamed (and off-camera) embassy staffer for stronger IP rights and cooperation between the US and Canada in enforcing those rights.

“It makes up almost a third of our total GDP, those IP industries, and they employ literally millions of Americans in the United States and around the world,” Kubiak says. “I don’t think you can overstate the impact of intellectual property and intellectual property crime.”

The US Embassy Ottawa told Ars via Facebook: "It’s World IP Day, so many of our missions may be focusing on the issue, just as we do throughout the year for events such as Earth Day, Women’s History Month, World Hunger Day, the Fourth of July, or even St. Patrick's Day!"

IP legal expert calls US view “outmoded”

Over in Spain, the US Embassy Madrid took the opportunity to post this message in Spanish to its Facebook readership:

April 26: International Day of intellectual property. In many countries, including the United States, copyright protection helps maintain the independence of the creative sector. Before the law to protect these rights, many authors, musicians, playwrights and other artists depended on the patronage of the state and the elites. However, the support came accompanied by limitations on artistic freedom. Do you think it’s important to protect copyright?

Yu seems to have found Washington’s choice of his essay a bit baffling.

"If you are a diplomat and the World Intellectual Property Day is organized by a UN specialized agency, it is only logical that you say something about intellectual property,” he told Ars. “The problem has never been that people focus their attention on intellectual property, but that they subscribe to a one-sided, and increasingly outmoded, view of intellectual property protection and enforcement."

Ambassador [Jeff] Levine visited Pirita High School of Economics today to mark World Intellectual Property Day. The Ambassador made opening remarks for the final seminar of the ‘Copyright matters’ project and discussed intellectual property rights (IPR) with about 100 students.

If you find any other examples of such messages from US embassies or any other country’s foreign service, please let us know in the comments. Oh, and Happy World IP Day!

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar

What a waste of time and effort. You want people to respect IP, then how about giving users the ability to use content in novel ways without being charged repeatedly for the same content over and over again, or how about realizing it's a world economy and ditch the ridiculous geographic restrictions and content delivery restrictions.

Sadly our government paid off by lobbyists for these industries just keeps giving more rights to the IP holders at the expense of the public.

It's ironic that America is one of the most draconian enforcer of IP, given that in the past Americans had no qualms with stealing technology from Britain and Germany when they were technologically behind.

This sort of craziness is one of the biggest reasons that the US has such bad PR problems in other countries. If you send you "Copyright Czar" (funniest title ever) to Canada to demand we change our copyright laws to be more in line with your draconian and absurd copyright laws you're only eating away at good will.

Given the sorts of 'contractors' who suddenly start crawling around US embassies when we really get serious about ensuring that the locals make the right choices on important issues, I'd say we've gotten off lightly this time...

And I just went on every one of those FB Pages to leave a Comment.All of you should do the same thing and spread the word so it goes Streisland.I did see Ars Cyrus there as well leaving comments on all those pages.Thank You Cyrus for taking the time out !

hmmm, just looked this up: according to the labor dept, just over 400,000 people were employed by the movie and record industry in march. US population is over 300 million. so a third of our GDP goes to... about 1.3 percent of the population.

It's ironic that America is one of the most draconian enforcer of IP, given that in the past Americans had no qualms with stealing technology from Britain and Germany when they were technologically behind.

hmmm, just looked this up: according to the labor dept, just over 400,000 people were employed by the movie and record industry in march. US population is over 300 million. so a third of our GDP goes to... about 1.3 percent of the population.

So... yea.

The problem is that 'IP' is a vague term. An 'IP industry' for their purposes is one that has a copyright, patent, trademark, and possibly a few other things. Trademark makes up the biggest portion by quit a margin, so it's saying that a third of our GDP comes from businesses with names.

"As ridiculous as it was when the American ambassador to Australia spoke out against Aussies pirating Game of Thrones this week, "

Hey Cyrus. Do some research ffs. It's real hard, I know, but it can pay off.

From the Wikipedia entry for "Ambassador":

Support Prosperity

Another result of the increase in foreign travel is the growth of trade between nations. For most countries, the national economy is now part of the global economy. This means increased opportunities to sell and trade with other nations. When two nations are conducting a trade, it is usually advantageous to both parties to have an ambassador and perhaps a small staff living in the other land, where they act as an intermediary between cooperative businesses.[5][4]